GOVERNMENT & MEDIA RIDICULE

If this meme is true, please explain “Teens.”

“Teens” are collected, fed, and warehoused by the gov’t into schools across the nation, but they never seem to fit to this meme’s description.

“Teens” reject any authority.

“Teens” can’t remember, nor can they repeat for the test.

“Teens” only repetition amounts to “Beat They Ass!” and “I Dindu Nuffin!” They never have accurate memory of any facts, occurences, or, even identities of other “teens” involved in the day’s activities.

“Teens” only observably consistent behavior is “non-compliance.”

“Teens” never conform intellectually or socially, at least to society at large. The only possible understanding of #5 is that they may conform to the latest hip-hop/rap craze.

“Teens” apparently do not ever receive any of the meme’s state benefits, even though they go through school at least until the minimum age required to drop out.

John Taylor Gatto’s “Seven Lessons”:

• 1. Confusion. Everything I teach is out of context. I teach the un-relating and disconnections of everything. I teach too much: from the orbiting of planets to adjectives. Curricula are full of internal contradictions and lack coherence. Kids leave school without one genuine enthusiasm or indepth appreciation of anything. Human beings seek meaning, not disconnected facts.

“In a world where home is only a ghost because both parents work, or because of too many moves or job changes or too much ambition… I teach you how to accept confusion as your destiny.”

• 2. Class position. I teach students they must stay in the class where they belong. If I do my job well, the kids can’t even imagine themselves somewhere else, because I have shown them how to envy and fear the better classes, and to have contempt for the dumb classes. The lesson is everyone has a proper place in the pyramid and you must stay where you are put.
• 3. Indifference. I teach children not to care too much about anything, even though they want to make it appear that they do. I do this by demanding students become totally involved in my lessons, exhibit enthusiasm for my teaching, compete with each other for my favor. But when the bell rings I insist they drop whatever they’ve been doing and proceed to the next class.

“Indeed, the lesson of bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything.”

• 4. Emotional dependency. By stars and red checks, smiles and frowns, I teach kids to surrender their will to the predestinated chain of command. Individuality is a contradiction to class theory and curse to all systems of classification.
• 5. Intellectual dependency. Good students wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. They learn that we must wait for others, better trained, to make the choices that will direct our lives. successful children do the thinking I assign with a minimum of resistance and decent show of enthusiasm. Curiosity has no place, only conformity. Bad kids fight this, even though they lack the concepts to know what they are fighting. There are procedures to break the will of those who resist. Our entire economy depends upon this lesson being learned. Think of what might fall apart if children weren’t trained to be dependent. We’ve built a way of life that depends on people doing what they are told because they don’t know how to tell themselves what to do.
• 6. Provisional self-esteem. It is impossible to make self-confident spirits conform. Our world wouldn’t survive a flood such spirits, so I teach that a child’s self respect should depend on expert opinion. The lesson of report cards, grades, and tests is that children should not trust themselves or their parents, but rely on the evaluation of certified officials.
• 7. One can’t hide. I teach children they are always under constant surveillance. There are no private spaces for children, no private times. Students are encouraged to tattle on each other. The meaning of constant surveillance and denial of privacy is that no one can be trusted, privacy is not legitimate. Children must be closely watched if you want to keep a society under tight central control.

“Independent study, community service, adventures and experience, large doses of privacy and solitude, a thousand different apprenticeships — the one-day variety or longer — these are all powerful, cheap, and effective ways to start a real reform of schooling. But no large-scale reform is ever going to work to repair our damaged children and our damaged society until we force open the idea of “school” to include family as the main engine of education. If we use schooling to break children away from parents — and make no mistake, that has been the central function of schools since John Cotton announced it as the purpose of the Bay Colony schools in 1650 and Horace Mann announced it as the purpose of Massachusetts schools in 1850 — we’re going to continue to have the horror show we have right now.”
— John Taylor Gatto (Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling)

MORE:
https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/41319.John_Taylor_Gatto?page=1